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Book Review: Front Page Affair by Radha Vatsal

book review Front Page Affair by Radha Vatsal

Out of the Gate Like a Stutz Bearcat

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Radha Vatsal is a scholar and a talented storyteller, evident in her strong historical mystery debut, A Front Page Affair, just released this summer.

Capability Weeks (“Kitty” to her friends) and her father (a well-to-do, self-made mogul) live well in 1915 New York City. Kitty, a young addition to the New York Sentinel‘s Ladies Page, covers a July 4th society soiree and becomes tied to a murder and what looks like a plot to endanger the delicate international balance. 

Kitty Weeks (and supporting cast) are wonderful. She’s young and privileged and begins to recognize what that has meant in her life throughout this story. I don’t go for that combination in a hero much, but Kitty’s introspection and awareness redeem her (to me at least). A hero who can throw money at their problems and make them go away is not much of a hero. Kitty also works not only externally but internally as well, to find solutions, being creative and brave throughout.

Radha Vatsal has sentences in this book that are heavy with history. It’s hard to write historical novels without ‘info dumping’ on readers. It’s a challenge to weave historical information, foreign to modern readers, and achieve a native harmony so readers glide along, learning without being jarred by the thrills and not the history.

…

RECOMMENDED

Get in on this new series straight away. You’ll enjoy this plucky young hero as she matures during a time of great change in our nation and our world. Strong historical research sunk deep below the surface pushes this debut novel to the top of my recommendation list this month. For a work of fiction, there’s a fantastic ‘Further Reading’ and ‘Selected References and Sources’ pages. Old historian habits die hard.

About the Author: Benjamin Clark writes historical mysteries and works as a history museum curator.

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Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book for review.

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Book Review: Six Bad Things by Charlie Huston

Book Six Bad Things by Charlie Huston
Book Six Bad Things by Charlie Huston
Six Bad Things by Charlie Huston

It was the blurb on the cover that did it. “This is one mean, cold, slit-eyed mother of a book.” — Peter Straub.

A couple weeks ago, I roamed Omaha’s wonderful Jackson Street Booksellers, and I know there’s at least one dedicated James Crumley fan on staff who puts books on a certain big table for browsers. Finding this book on that table carries the same weight to me as a personal recommendation from a good friend. This table is one of my best friends.

Table’s recommendation didn’t let me down. Six Bad Things by Charlie Huston is book two of a three book series. It’s unlike me to go out of order (if there’s an order) but I felt like I was caught up quickly and not too out of the loop on the main character and what had gone on to this point at the opening of book 2.   It’s contemporary noir (ca. 2005), so my history die-hards may look askance, but shouldn’t!  Classic noir fans will enjoy Huston’s style, though I will warn you, this is not a book for those with language and violence sensitivities.

This book is nearly non-stop, with nuanced and realistic action, and a main character that perfectly walks that line between hero and anti-hero. The main character, Hank Thompson, is also nuanced and realistic, conflicted. There are cracks in his life and character as a result of his choices. It’s also unexpectedly funny.

A big recommend from me.  Thanks, big table.

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Book Review: Drive!

Stuck in mud

201605_goldstone_driveDrive!: Henry Ford, George Selden, and the Race to Invent the Auto Age by Lawrence Goldstone

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A useful history I will return to again and again. Taking the 30,000-foot view, with plenty of details to give the history a personal feel. With the wide-angle overview approach, however, the story moves along without becoming bogged down in details most readers won’t be looking for in such a book. Goldstone weaves the early history of automobiles into a highly readable account, creating a very straight-forward narrative arc, though historical topics are anything but. Highly recommend to those interested in the later Industrial Revolution, early 20th-century history, and of course, car nuts.

If you’re looking at Lawrence Goldstone’s name and thinking it looks familiar, he and his wife wrote at least three excellent memoirs about bibliophiles and the rare book trade — that was my introduction to him as a writer.

This book was provided to me via NetGalley for review.

View all my GoodReads reviews

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VHS is Dead: Obsolete in the Archives

Formats come and go.

Ask the 8-track audio tape and VHS’s rival the Betamax. Curators and archivists are ready for it … right?

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From the Archives, a 3M T60 Professional VHS Videocassette

To be clear, it’s the venerable VCR that is ceasing production, not VHS tapes. There’s a proud history of media outlasting the players … Sony only stopped producing Beta tapes this past March.

Being the age I am, I remember home video being a new thing. As a youngster, my family going for a Friday night/ weekend splurge to the Video Station (I think that’s what it was called) and renting VHS tapes and a VCR. We didn’t own one ourselves. They had VHS and Beta tapes and players I remember, but there was way more selection on VHS, so that’s what we always got. The players came in this big hard plastic carrying case. It was a while before we had our own VCR. My Dad won it in a sales competition at the car dealership where he worked then.

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The first thing I ever bought online was a VHS tape. (I think. There’s a good chance it was actually a book, but for the sake of this blog post, it was a VHS tape.) I had read somewhere that the greatest cinematic car chase ever put on film was in the 1960s for an early Michael Caine caper film called The Italian Job. The cover of my copy had this mobster guy and this sexy lady back with a map on it — neither image really had much to do with the movie. It did get some looks on my shelf of tapes in college, though.

The people at the Video Station had never heard of it. The people at every video store in town had never heard of it. No one at the library had heard of it. But, Web 1.0 certainly knew about it! As quick as you please, the tape was on my doorstep! I couldn’t believe how simple it was.

The cover of my copy had this mobster guy lounging and this sexy lady’s back with a map on it — neither image really had much to do with the movie. It did get some looks on my shelf of tapes in college, though. (“Uh, what kind of movie is this?”) If you’ve never seen it, it’s actually a lot of fun. Not really a mystery, but crime/ thriller/ caper film. It does have one of the greatest car chase scenes of the pre-CGI era.

So, what does VHS obsolescence mean for us in museum and archive land? We need to be sure we have good equipment on the shelf and know how to maintain and clean it. We also need a plan to migrate our VHS tapes to other formats. Afterall, you don’t want all that great content being stranded on formats you can’t access. We have enough of that already (I’m looking at you 3M Sound On Slides)

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Tapes on tapes on tapes

Will VHS become collectible some day? Will there be rare video shops, like rare book shops? Will devotees come in and say things like “It smells so good in here, reminds me of a Video Station circa 1986.”  Will the analog tape speak to photography-on-film buffs? Will people start to glow talking about the grain of the film? Will they be like vinyl records some day?

9 Reasons VHS can be Expensive/ Rare

25 Rare Films That Never Made it to DVD (Including Sherlock Holmes,  a version of the Godfather and other stuff I’d love to see)

I have my doubts. Beta already has a cult following that is decades old. On that front of the video format wars, VHS lost. I think it’ll be the people searching for the content more than the pleasure of the format.

 

Like this post? Here’s more about life behind the scenes in museums and archives:
BINGO! At the Intersection of History and Slang
How to know Things are Bound to get Worse
How to Research History Like a Novelist

 

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

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How to Research History Like a Novelist – Warm water & paper towels

Tip-tapping out some new words in my current story and my main character uses “Warm water and a handful of paper towels…” And it occurs to me, ‘Wait. When were paper towels invented?’ (I readily admit, this doesn’t sound like the most riveting action, but … you’ll see.)

I don’t stop every time a question like this occurs to me while writing. It kills flow. Usually, I put a bracket [] around it and come back to it — I drop brackets in for fact checks, or anything that needs extra attention after the first draft is done, like when I need character names. Sometimes I just don’t have a name ready, so I write [bad guy’s favorite plumber] or whatever so I know who it is and find a suitable name.  But a quick glance at Wikipedia

1921, Brown Co. Paper Towels
By 1921 (when this promotional photograph was taken, the brown, folded paper towels from Nibroc Paper Towels were everywhere. Similar products are still in use today. Photo courtesy of the Brown Company Collection, Plymouth State University.

should answer this important paper towel question for me. Right?

According to the article I found on Wikipedia, paper towels were invented in 1907 and look to be commonplace by the 1920s. Perfect. For my later 1930s story, my main character could totally use him some paper towels.

Running an image search, I found a wonderful, in-depth history of the leading manufacturer of paper towels in the period, the Brown Company of New Hampshire. The article mentioned that during the Depression (i.e. during my later 1930s story), “Demand decreased. Profits shrank. In 1935, Brown Company filed for bankruptcy and the Brown family lost ownership.”

So, the later 1930s were not a booming time to be in the paper towel business, nor a great time of using them. So, it looks like instead of “Warm water and a handful of paper towels…” it’s going to be something different. For now. The whole scene may get scrapped in revision, but that moment is now far better, and a small moment to reveal more of my Character’s character, and that’s a good thing.

As a National History Day judge, I’m among the chorus of historians who bemoan the use of Wikipedia as the only stop for research by students. Not that Wikipedia isn’t amazing. Not all that long ago, the question of when paper towels were invented would probably leave me at the mercy of an old-ish marketing pamphlet giving precious little actual information, and I’d have to wait a few days to get that answer through a research librarian. But really, Wikipedia is only a starting point. Without what was there (and first of all, let’s appreciate the fact there was an entry on the history of paper towels in the first place!), I wouldn’t have had my other information for search criteria to dig just a little deeper.

If I really had to know as close to 100% as possible, I’d dig up financials of places like the place my hero is using paper towels at the state, county, or city archives. I’d check with the corporate collections, and even try to interview some people who were alive in that place and time. But this is just paper towels. Wikipedia saying yes they were available would be fine for 99.999% of readers. The only reader whose reading experience would be ruined would be the timber industry historian, but you know what; I want that person to read and enjoy my books too.

So, thank God for the internet, but really, thank you for the people putting their research ‘out there’ never really knowing how, when, or to whom it may prove useful.

Like this post? Here’s more about historical research:
BINGO! At the Intersection of History and Slang
How to know Things are Bound to Get Worse

 

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.

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“Bingo.” At the intersection of History & Slang

BINGO

I can get swept along when writing, especially when writing dialogue. I’ve heard this state of writing called “flow” and that makes sense to me. Cruising along in my current story, set sometime around 1935 and out of the mouth of one of my characters comes the word “Bingo.”  I’ve never used the word outside the game with the balls and whirlywheels myself, but this fictional gent decided to say it in my story.  It jolted me out of the story and I thought: Did anyone even use the word Bingo in the ’30s?  Just one of the things I worry about.

BINGO
BINGO

In my story, I mean “Bingo” in the sense of “you got it” not “I have aligned 5 arbitrary letter-number combinations, give me a prize.”  Etymological dictionaries on my shelf say maybe Bingo goes back to 1815, the other says maybe only 1936 without much explanation.  Not very helpful.  I want my stories to capture language as it was used, to sound natural but be historically…well, probable if not absolutely correct.

Etymological dictionaries saying it was used in 1815, so yes, it would fine in a story set in the 1930s just isn’t good enough.  In historical research, we sometimes get to that point of proving if something was at all possible and ignore if it was probable.  It’s setting a too low bar for historical accuracy.

This is where Google Books’ Ngram Viewer can be helpful.  It uses the collective bajillion-zillion words scanned by Google Books and charts them by year published.  You can use it to chart a word or phrase’s popularity in all of GoogleBooks 450 million scanned published works.  It’s not definitive, and may not perfectly reflect normal conversation, but certainly helpful to see how frequently the word was used in print.  I don’t think it includes newspapers, which would be very useful if it would.

Turns out 1930-something isn’t a great time of the word Bingo.  It was around, and was used earlier according to this chart, but has been climbing in popularity since then. The true high-water mark came in 1976, apparently.  No idea why that would be, but that’s for someone else to chase.  I have a story to get back to.

Bingo

Like this post? Here’s more about historical research:
How to know Things are Bound to get Worse
How to Research History like a Novelist

About the Author: Benjamin L. Clark writes and works as a museum curator.